Manzanar Committee

The following is from the Tule Lake Committee.

It has been 67 years since the U.S. government unjustly incarcerated 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry in ten War Relocation Authority camps, implementing a policy of exclusion and detention mandated by Executive Order 9066.

Tule Lake became the largest and most controversial WRA camp when, in 1943, it was converted into a high-security Segregation Center to imprison 12,000 Japanese Americans deemed “disloyal” to the United States. The allegation of disloyalty was based on two deeply flawed questions—#27 questioned willingness to serve in the U.S. military forces and #28 questioned disavowal of loyalty to the Japanese emperor—that were used to divide persons of Japanese ancestry into categories of “loyal” and “disloyal.” Those who refused to give the mandatory “yes” answers to both questions were classified as disloyal and segregated at Tule Lake.

Despite passage of over 65 years of Redress and a Presidential apology, the Japanese Americans who protested and refused to cooperate with this government demand to prove loyalty remain at the margins of our history, usually ignored or stigmatized as disloyal troublemakers for their dissent.

The 2009 Tule Lake Pilgrimage is dedicated to this spirit of dissent, to recognize the thousands of Japanese Americans who protested and were segregated at Tule Lake Segregation Center. We especially encourage survivors who were segregated in Tule Lake and their families to join us at this pilgrimage. These memories are a valuable part of our history, and we hope you will share your stories of our unsung Japanese American past.

For more information, or to register for the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, click on the image above right.